I am feeling somewhat bi-polar when it comes to all things related to Occupy Wall Street. I have moments of pride and compassion and JOY to think of people rising up and taking action. And I have moments of disgust and anger at people whining and complaining and doing nothing constructive with their energy.
And so I give you She Said/ She Said.

On Wednesday I took Noah to karate, with Ezra and Ike in tow, and as I was directing Ezra to take a seat in the back, I caught a glimpse of myself in the giant mirror that lines the room. And I had that moment, like when you turn on your phone’s camera to find it reversed and reflecting the underside of your chin(s), and you’re shocked to see what you actually look like, and it’s about 10 years older and 100 times more homely than you look in the mirror in your head.

People climb Mt. Everest.
This blows my head off as I can’t even get my paper piles sorted neatly on my desk.
I can’t climb ladders without tears.
I let myself down on a weekly basis with goal setting plans.
I am certain that it must involve some sort of awakening in the soul to make big life altering choices like flying around the world to climb the mountain that kills so many people. But people climb mountains and do so many great extraordinary things. People push fear down into their old toes every single day.

The government of Uganda claims that the LRA has only 500 or 1,000 soldiers in total, but other sources estimate that there could be as many as 3,000 soldiers, along with about 1,500 women and children.The bulk of the soldiers fighting for the LRA are children…Since the LRA first started fighting in 1987 they may have forced well over 10,000 boys and girls into combat, often killing family, neighbors and school teachers in the process.
Many of these children were put on the front lines so the casualty rate for these children has been high. They have often used children to fight because they are easy to replace by raiding schools or villages.

After four kids, I know now that it’s all fleeting. I’ll remember as much about their first year as they’ll remember themselves, except for what I’ve captured here, in short stories and photos – my attempt to maintain some semblance of a baby book so that when they’re older and asking me, I can say “Here. Read this. See, I was funny. And you were a royal pain in the ass.

I simply don’t believe that sending a child to Christian school makes a child more Christian. In fact, I’m pretty sure a carefully controlled religious environment can actually have the opposite effect. Which is to say, I knew more hypocrites inside my tiny, sheltered Christian school than I did once I entered public school. I was a hardened little hypocrite myself. There seems to be something about insularity–even for “good” reasons like protecting a child’s faith–that engenders hypocrisy and self-righteous religiosity.